Success or Snub? It Happened One Night (7th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

To see part 1, click here.

Cleopatra Suite~Alex North - Cleopatra

Let’s start off this section by just coming out and saying that 1934 was not a good year for movies. The Hays Code would go into full effect on June 13th, 1934 when they adopted the Production Code Administration. Starting on July 1st, all movies would have to be okayed by the Hays Office, in particular Joseph Breen who, as mentioned before, was a Puritanical asshole who embodied everything wrong with 1930s American culture. As a result, a lot of movies that came out during this year were probably made to be edgy and have darker themes but would be severely censored by the Hays Office. 

This creates kind of a weird gray zone when it comes to 1934 cinema as films that came out in the first half of the year were pushing people’s sensitivities (e.g. Tarzan and his Mate shows Maureen O’Sullivan swimming naked and leaves very little to the imagination) while ones that came out in the back half were severely neutered. The rules and censorships that the Hays Code enforced would range from the kinda understandable (re-releases of Frankenstein (1931) would omit a line where Dr. Frankenstein proclaimed to be God) to the hilariously petty (The Gay Divorce was renamed The Gay Divorcee because, while a divorcee could be happy, divorce is an unholy action that cannot be seen as happy) to the downright disgusting (Imitation of Life, one of the first films to analyze race relations, was almost banned because of miscegenation; as a result of censorship, the film is actually quite racist by today’s standards when it was made to be the exact opposite).

Honestly, looking at the line-up of films in 1934, it’s a struggle to find one that’s not only as good as It Happened One Night but also just as influential on the American psyche at the time. There were some historically significant films that came out that year but almost all of them just exist as pieces of trivia and not as genuinely great movies like It Happened One Night. There was Of Human Bondage (which was Bette Davis’ breakout film),

The Black Cat (the first psychological horror film and the first movie to pair Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff together),

Queen Christina (the first movie to have a crossdressing main character),

Murder at the Vanities (the first backstage musical to crossover with a murder-mystery),

Viva Villa! (one of the first epic biopics)

and One Night of Love (which introduced a new way of audio recording).

All of these run the gamut from good to crap but none are great.

There were also a few films that were the first sound adaptations of popular literary works: Treasure Island,

The Count of Monte Cristo

and Babes in Toyland.

These are all a bit better and have stuck around a bit more in pop culture, although, ironically, they all seem to have been shown up by later adaptations, remaining as the sort-of second-most definitive versions of their respective works. (Babes in Toyland was shown up by the 1961 version, The Count of Monte Cristo was eclipsed by the 2002 version and Treasure Island is now mostly remembered by the 1951 version).

Babes in Toyland in particular seems to have stuck around as one of Laurel and Hardy’s most popular movies, often being re-aired countless times on TV around Christmastime and being one of the earliest steps in the fantasy genre, comprising one of the biggest and most expensive sets at the time. It was supposed to be the first ever color film but the schedule ran out before they could fully develop meaning that the movie was originally released in Sepiatone, which contributed to the film’s original box office and critical failure (and probably why it received no nominations at the Academy Awards). It would later be remastered in color and re-released alternately as March of the Wooden Soldiers and Laurel and Hardy in Toyland to recoup the losses, eventually turning it into a large success.

If we’re going to compare It Happened One Night to other films in the romantic-comedy genre, then the other two big rom-coms of that year were The Merry Widow and The Gay Divorcee (arguably Murder at the Vanities and the below Shirley Temple movies as well but, honestly, every movie at the time has romance and comedy so it depends on how you define this).

    The Merry Widow is another one of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic-comedies as well as a vehicle for Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. It has the same level of Lubitsch’s whimsy as The Love Parade and Trouble in Paradise, and I like that they make the main character genuinely unlikable for some of the movie, but it’s not Lubitsch’s best and not as good as It Happened One Night.

The Gay Divorcee was a much bigger film, being the breakout movie of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (for those who don’t know, Astaire and Rogers are arguably the greatest and most influential dancers in cinematic history, influencing Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson). Along the lines of It Happened One Night, The Gay Divorcee is another one of the archetypical romances of old-school Hollywood, telling of how a guy named, uh, Guy (Fred Astaire) becomes smitten with a woman named Mimi (Ginger Rogers) within ten seconds of meeting her. He then pursues her across the world to try to get her to fall in love with him, even though she hates him.

Unlike It Happened One Night, the romance here is a lot more sexual harassment-y by today’s standards. Back then, this was the kind of cartoony over-the-topness that made audiences laugh as it’s clear that no one in their right mind would behave like this though now that we’re a few generations removed and everyone has been raised on mass media, it’s the kind of thing that most idiot boys tend to think is the right way to treat girls (note: it’s not). Normally, I wouldn’t mind but I think what really makes it age poorly is that this movie lacks the whimsy and/or dark comedy that makes Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch’s movies so much fun to watch.

Once the two main characters actually do start dating, however, the movie is a lot of fun and it ultimately culminates in one of the most influential musical numbers in cinematic history, The Continental, which would win the first Oscar for Best Song. Along with the finale to 42nd Street (1933), this is considered the great-granddaddy of all epic musical numbers, being a 16-minute-long extravaganza that’s still a treat to watch. It’s still worth going back to see, though I don’t think the rest of the movie surrounding it has aged quite as well.

Thankfully, this is why God invented YouTube.

(Astaire and Rogers would basically redo this formula a couple more times in following years, with Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937). Of these, I highly recommend Swing Time as it’s one of their best films and one of my favorite romances in any movie.)

  I’d be remiss if I went through this installment without mentioning one of the biggest stars that got made that year: Shirley Temple, who encountered her breakout films with Stand Up and Cheer!, Little Miss Marker and Bright Eyes. (The fact that all three of these movies came out in the same year shows you how fast the Golden Age of Hollywood could work.) She became such a star that at the 7th Academy Awards, she was awarded an honorary Oscar for “contributions to cinema” becoming the first ever child actress to win an award.

I would say that that's impressive but I also think that these awards don't actually matter so I won't.

Shirley was a big deal for her era, becoming as much of a part of Hollywood royalty as Clark Gable at a certain point. As mentioned above, while the Great Depression was an extraordinarily awful time to be alive, Hollywood tended to peddle the fantasy of an idealized America with upbeat atmospheres. Very, very few movies actually even mentioned the Great Depression, let alone showed the ramifications of what most Americans were facing, until near the end of the decade.

Thus, Shirley Temple was the bastard dream of some Hollywood producers to show audiences some kitschy, idealized, perfect little child who is surrounded by idiot adults that want to give her a perfect life. This made her a big hit at the time though it carries the side-effect of making her films age like milk. Seriously, if you’re over the age of 8, there’s very little quality to be mined from her films these days.

Talking about them one by one, Stand Up and Cheer! is incidentally one of the very few aforementioned movies to talk about the Great Depression. Shirley Temple’s actually not in it all that much as it instead revolves around a theater manager (Warner Baxter) who is hired by the President of the United States to put on a massive show for the American people to lift them out of the quite-literal Great Depression. It makes little to no sense, is casually racist and comes off as the studio self-congratulating itself on making people happy but, to be fair, I think it’s just an excuse to make a variety show movie. Temple is one of the acts put on and was the thing that most audiences remembered from the film.

Little Miss Marker was the first film to have her as the lead and, similar to It Happened One Night, is an early pioneer for most of the clichés you see in a lot of family films. The film revolves around a group of gangsters, led by Sorrowful Jones (Adolphe Menjou), who run a crooked horse-racing ring. One of their customers (Edward Earle) uses his daughter Marky (Shirley Temple) as a bet. After his horse loses, the dad kills himself leaving the gangsters to try to figure out how to raise a kid, with Sorrowful Jones especially being given most of the responsibility, along with a showgirl named Bangles (Dorothy Dell). Can little Marky’s warm nature get mean ol’ Sorrowful to come out of his shell and finally admit his feelings for Bangles?

This is probably the best of Shirley Temple’s movies, even being nominated for the Oscar for Outstanding Production that year. While it did sort of define the formula for her movies of her being adopted by some irresponsible dad and mom figure who slowly admit their feelings for each other due to creating a makeshift family, this one actually has aged (relatively) well. Not only is the acting really good, especially from Adolphe Menjou (who looks like he’s suffering his own personal Hell every time he’s next to the little girl), but also because they write Marky like a real kid who gets into real trouble (one of the film’s major conflicts is the gangsters realizing that she’s swearing because they do it all the time in front of her). Plus, there is something actually kinda funny about seeing Little Caesar-esque gangsters being forced to raise a kid.

Bright Eyes, on the other hand, is insufferable. This one’s a lot more streamlined as Shirley (both the character and actress’ name) lives with her mom (Lois Wilson), who works as a servant for an evil rich family called the Smythes (Theodor von Eltz, Dorothy Christy and Jane Withers) (who are the only characters in the movie that are still funny). Shirley frequently plays with her godfather, Loop (James Dunn), the Smythes’ patriarch, Ned (Charles Sullin) and Loop’s love interest, Adele (Judith Allen). And that’s it. That’s the plot. Nothing more to it than that. Just 90 minutes of Shirley acting sickeningly cute and the adults talking about how awesome she is.

Okay, in all fairness, there is kinda a plot and conflict in the back half of the movie but it’s very insipid and can be solved in just 5 minutes. I know this because once the characters stop acting like ingrates and actually talk with each other, the plot is solved in 5 minutes. It’s also where the song “On the Good Ship, Lollipop” comes from, which is commonly considered Shirley Temple's leitmotif. Unlike The Continental from The Gay Divorcee, this is less significant breakthrough in song numbers, though, and more of an exercise to see how long you can last without wanting to vomit.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of these movies. I don’t blame the kid as she’s clearly the byproduct of some studio brain and outdated cultural values of Great Depression-era America. In fact, Shirley herself didn’t seem like a bad actress once you got over the cutesiness as her later movies proved that she could be a great crier when the time called for it. It’s just that the rest of the movies surrounding her could be very terrible and occasionally very, very racist (The Littlest Rebel (1935) and Dimples (1936) are two films that are pretty offensive even by the standards of the time).

So, why am I devoting time to talk about this? Well, one, like I said, Little Miss Marker is still a good kid’s movie and was a big hit of the year so it’s worth considering but two, and more importantly, I had to watch almost all of her filmography for this blog series to properly critique 30s cinema. If you’ve watched as many of her Godawful films as I have then you would want to find some page time to dedicate to a thinly-veiled rant about how much you hate them. (This sub-chapter may or may not have originally been 50 pages of alternating about how much I hate the Hays Office and Bright Eyes again and again.) Quite frankly, I wish her movies would be forgotten though the powers that be often try to still sell her complete boxset. Aside from Little Miss Marker, though, her only film I’d recommend for the young ‘uns that won’t make Mom and Dad suffer is Heidi (1937) and maaaaaybe Captain January (1936) and The Little Colonel (1935). Little Miss Marker is the best though and still holds up as a solid kids’ movie.

(Also, since I’m not going to be reviewing Temple's films in later blogs, I’d like to just get this record off my chest here for 1935 in cinema. I’m trying to be an objective critic and not hate-watch movies but everyone has a line. I watched well over 150 films from the 1930s for this blog and I cannot think of one that I hated more than Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel. It is unironically one of the worst movies I have ever sat through in my life.)

Getting back to the task at hand, we’ve effectively ruled out just about everything else from being a competition for It Happened One Night. In fact, I’m not even entirely sure what the biggest competitions at the Oscar were that year since it was such a blowout. Looking at the records, influence and what critics loved, though, I think we should close out this chapter with a quick analysis of Cleopatra, one of Cecil B. DeMille’s epics, and The Thin Man, which started a franchise of films also called The Thin Man.

The Thin Man is another one of those old-school movie franchises that you may not have heard of but its archetype is pretty definitive. William Powell and Myrna Loy play a pair of rich socialites called the Charleses… Charlesai… oh, I’m not falling for this crap again- William Powell and Myrna Loy play a pair of rich socialites named Nick and Nora Charles who solve a murder-mystery together. While this wasn’t the first movie to concern a murder investigation, it was one of the first, if not the first, to play it this comedically.

Powell and Loy have been described by famed film critic, Roger Ebert, as being to dialogue what Astaire and Rogers were to dancing. The two of them play off of each other perfectly, having a bunch of witticisms that provide relief from the darker nature of what they’re investigating. A lot of the film’s dialogue exchanged between the two is witty as Hell and making fun of their marriage or fawning over their Wire Fox Terrier, Asta. Despite this, it’s all in good fun and you do buy them as being a pretty cute and caring married couple (in fact, I think they’re one of the very few old-school Hollywood movies that actually portrays a healthy relationship). This kind of trope of two characters, either lover or best friends, solving a mystery is one of the most definitive stories in Hollywood, being imitated by Agatha Christie stories and Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

The Thin Man would eventually go on to spawn 5 sequels that would get steadily sillier and sillier though this first one does seem to play the plot pretty straight. It does take its sweet time to get on the road, which is a bit of a problem, but, still, it’s a fun movie with a pretty good mystery. The climax is also a ton of fun and I think a big part of why people loved this movie. While murder-mysteries were done before this, they usually end in a big shootout or chase or cornering the killer. Here, Nick and Nora invite all of the suspects to have dinner together and Nick reveals his findings to see who cracks. The suspects are all good ones and I honestly didn’t actually know who the final murderer was until the end of the movie which is always a sign that the movie’s doing something right. (Interestingly, while the title The Thin Man would go on to refer to the character of Nick Charles, in the original film it’s supposed to refer to the missing person he’s looking for.)

       And, finally, there’s Cleopatra. Similar to Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille is one of the most important characters in the Golden Age of Hollywood. In fact, he’s arguably the person who made Hollywood what it was. His career goes all the way back to The Squaw Man in 1914 which was the first major film churned out of Los Angeles and its success helped turn the city into the filmmaking capital of America. While Capra and Lubitsch were respectively known for their idealized fantasies and whimsical romances, DeMille is known for an epic scale and politics-heavy story in his films that few other directors at the time could emulate. Even if his films weren’t always great, they were so epically not great and he’s made some of the most well-known film epics of all time.

Cleopatra is right up there as one of his best. It would be overshadowed in later years by the Elizabeth Taylor version in 1963, which I think is a shame as this movie is really good. The scale is unbelievable, even by today’s standards. The castles, the dancers, the number of extras on camera at once, it’s all incredible to look at.

The story is pretty solid too. All the characters are very likable and given proper development, which is pretty impressive considering the subject matter. There’s a lot of moving parts in the plot as the film deals with the political landscapes of both ancient Egypt and Rome and dealing with the respective villains in both regions. Being able to balance these plots while still getting the story across ain’t easy, especially when you consider that the film isn’t long either. It doesn’t even reach the 2-hour mark.

This is another film that lucked out due to the Hays Code, being released right before it went into effect. If you want to see just how raunchy movies were starting to get by the time the Code took over, this is a great watch in that regard too. Claudette Colbert’s costume shows off almost everything and her scenes with Julius Caesar (Warren William) and Mark Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) would not fly just 6 months later.

I especially love Warren William’s portrayal as Julius Caesar and think it’s one of the best portrayals of Caesar ever put to film. Most other film adaptations tend to humanize him too much in his relationship with Cleopatra or his retirement. This guy seems much more impenetrable with a face chiseled from rock. This is the man who brought the world to heel and made it his own.

It’s really hard comparing Cleopatra and The Thin Man to It Happened One Night as these are all such radically different movies. Cleopatra still holds up as a great film epic and definitely worth checking out and The Thin Man still has a solid murder-mystery to back it up. Both were lauded at their release, with Cleopatra winning the Oscar for Best Cinematography (deservedly so). But neither was as lauded as It Happened One Night.

I mean, Hell, go back and read the first part of this chapter again. It Happened One Night wasn’t just a beloved movie, it literally changed how people wore shirts. No one is going to deny that it was by far the most influential and beloved movie that year. So, to make a long-story short, calling It Happened One Night the outstanding production of 1934 was a…

SUCCESS!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1934:

• Babes in Toyland (dir. Gues Meins & Charles Rogers)
• Cleopatra (dir. Cecil B. DeMille)
• It Happened One Night (dir. Frank Capra)
• Little Miss Marker (dir. Alexander Hall)
• Murder at the Vanities (dir. Mitchell Leisen)
• Queen Christina (dir. Rouben Mamoulian)
• The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)
• The Merry Widow (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
• The Thin Man (dir. W. S. Van Dyke)
• Treasure Island (dir. Victor Fleming)

Favorite Heroes:

• Jack Ellery (Jack Oakie) (Murder at the Vanities)
• Lawrence Cromwell (Warner Baxter) (Stand Up and Cheer!)
• Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) (The Thin Man)
• Queen Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert) (Cleopatra)
• Sorrowful Jones (Adolphe Menjou) (Little Miss Marker)

Favorite Villains:

• Hjalmir Poelzig (Boris Karloff) (The Black Cat)
• J. Wellington, Anita and Joy Smythe (Theodor von Eltz, Dorothy Christy and Jane Withers) (Bright Eyes)
• Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) (Treasure Island)
• Octavian (Ian Keith) (Cleopatra)
• Silas Barnaby (Henry Brandon) (Babes in Toyland)